by Scott Frost
“By who?” I asked.
“Whoever killed John.”
“The investigating detective thinks it was suicide.”
Courson shook her head.
“He didn’t kill himself,” she said angrily.
“How do you know?”
She started to say something, then her eyes appeared to mist over.
“Because we loved each other,” she said.
“You were going to say something else.”
She nodded.
“What?” I asked.
“He was afraid of guns. I tried to take him shooting; he wouldn’t even touch mine. You can’t tell me he would . . .” The words slipped away from her.
I stepped around the couch and sat down on the arm.
“How did you find out he died?” I asked.
“He called me last night from the hospital, said he’d been in an accident and that Gavin was hurt.”
“You knew Gavin.”
She looked at me in surprise.
“He’s dead, too, isn’t he?”
“Yes.”
She took a deep breath and wiped away a tear from the corner of her eye.
“Did John say anything to you that was unusual?”
She looked at me for a moment and then nodded. “He said he had found something.”
“He didn’t say what it was?”
“No.”
“Do you know what case they were working on?”
“Just the usual things, personal-injury stuff.”
“How did he sound?”
“I thought he was just shaken by the accident, but that wasn’t it.”
“What was it?”
“He was scared. He told me not to come over here until I heard from him. But he never called so I came this morning. A woman from the coroner’s office and a detective were here,” Courson said.
“Detective Williams?” I asked.
She nodded.
“Did they take the computer and leave the desk like that?”
She shook her head. “Someone else did.”
“Who?”
She took a breath. “He was here a couple of hours ago. I came back to get some of my things and he came walking out of the apartment with the computer. He looked at me and asked my name. I said it was Janice and I lived down the hall.”
“Why did you do that?”
“He frightened me,” she said.
“You don’t think he was a cop?” I asked.
She shook her head. “My father was a cop. I grew up around them, and this guy was different.”
“What was different about him?”
“The way he looked at me.”
“How was that?”
She took a breath as if she needed to steady herself just thinking about it.
“Like I was nothing,” Courson said.
“Could you ID him?”
She shook her head. “I just glanced at him for a second. He was older, beyond that I couldn’t tell you. I didn’t want him to see my face.”
She picked up the brown paper bag at her feet, walked over to the mantel, and took the picture of my brother and herself and put it in the bag.
“Can you tell me anything about his parents?” I said.
“His mother died of breast cancer when he was in college. I don’t know about his father. John had lots of secrets when it came to family.”
She looked at me. “But I guess you know about that?”
Courson looked at me for a moment as if she were trying to find a piece of John in me.
“I never knew him,” I said.
“You should have. He was . . .” The rest drifted away from her.
“I have to go,” she said.
“How do I get ahold of you?”
“I think I may go away for a while. You can leave me a message at the public defender’s office downtown.”
“You’re a lawyer?”
“Paralegal.”
I took out a card, wrote down my cell number on the back, and handed it to her.
“If you need to reach me for anything.”
She looked at it for a moment. “You’re not LAPD.”
“Pasadena.”
“This isn’t your case. It’s not even your jurisdiction, ” she said. “If LAPD thinks it’s a suicide then that’s the end of it. There’s nothing you can do.” She started toward the door.
“Dana,” I said.
She stopped.
“John tried to fax something to me last night but it never arrived. I think it was whatever he had found.”
“And he was killed because of it?” Courson said.
I nodded. “It’s possible.”
She glanced nervously at the door.
“I don’t want to die, Lieutenant,” Courson said, and then she turned and looked at me. “Do you?”
“I want to talk again. I want to know who he was,” I said.
She looked at me for a moment in silence. “He was your brother. What more do you need to know than that?”
Dana looked back into the apartment as if to find one last memory to hold on to, then rushed out.
I listened to the fall of her footsteps as she ran down the stairs, and then I closed the door and looked around the room. If I was ever to know anything about my brother, the answers were here for me to sift through like an archaeologist. I could find out what he liked for breakfast, what music he listened to, what clothes he wore, what medicine he kept in his bathroom, what books he read. And none of it would matter because I would never hear the sound of his laughter, or know the look in his eyes when he smiled.
I walked over to the bedroom door, pushed it open, and turned on the light. Just inside the door the phone machine sat on top of a small bookcase. A blinking red number said there were three messages. I hit play.
“Johnny, it’s me. Call me . . . John, where are you? Call me.”
The calls were from a bad cell-phone connection, but I guessed it was Dana’s voice. The last message was silent.
I hit the button to play my brother’s recording.
“I’m not home. You know what to do at the sound of the beep.”
I played it again and again, though I already knew the voice. I was hearing a memory speak out loud to me. The voice was just an octave higher than you would expect. It was the sound of my father saying good night to me for the last time before he disappeared from my life, and the hapless salesman on Bonanza trying to convince cowboys to trade in their horses for bicycles.
I went through the desk looking for a thread to connect the events of the last twenty-four hours—a meeting in a date book, a phone number on a Post-it— but there was nothing.
I stepped over to the window to get some fresh air. I could search the apartment for hours but I already knew what I needed to know. The one person who loved him didn’t believe he would take his own life.
I walked back into the living room and took the photograph of my father off the mantel, slipped it into the inside pocket of my suit, and walked out. A siren was wailing somewhere in the distance. The wind carried the faint presence of smoke with it. Someone had lit the first match, and L.A. was beginning to burn.
6
The clerk from the Western Union office lived in a large ten-story apartment building a block off Vermont on the edge of Koreatown. It was a short drive from Los Feliz so I decided to check it out rather than wait until tomorrow.
It was a prewar building that in its day must have been elegant, but was now, like most of its inhabitants, just barely hanging on. The sun had been down an hour, but the street was still crowded with people of every age trying to escape from the heat indoors. I parked across the street and got out.
Mariachi music drifted out of one of the building’s windows. Rap music boomed from a car down the block. A street vendor with the heavily lined face of a Mexican peasant was doing a brisk business selling flavored ices on the corner. As I walked across the street there wasn’t an individual within a block radius
who failed to take notice that a cop had just arrived.
If I was lucky, the clerk would be able to ID the man who confiscated the security tape. If I was right, that man would turn out to be the same individual who took the computer from my half brother’s apartment.
An old Otis elevator with brass doors that were faded with grime and tarnish dominated the lobby. The floor was a diamond pattern of black-and-white marble tiles. Two young women holding small children sat on benches across from the elevator talking in Spanish. As I walked toward the elevator one of the women said, “Peligro,” and pointed toward the stairs.
I thanked her and started up the stairs to the seventh floor, where the clerk lived. The air inside the building felt as if it hadn’t been circulated in years, and it carried the scent of the thousands of lives that had passed through the building. On the seventh-floor landing, a large window looked toward the east, where a thin orange line of flame glowing in the dark snaked across the Verdugo hills above Burbank.
A baby was crying somewhere, and the soft voice of a mother singing in Spanish drifted into the hallway. The clerk, Hector Lopez, lived in apartment 715 at the end of the hallway. I could hear a television inside when I stepped up. I knocked on the door, but no one responded. I knocked again.
“This is the police, Mr. Lopez.”
A small dog began barking in the next apartment. A door across the hallway opened a crack and then quickly closed.
“Mr. Lopez, I have a few questions.”
I started to knock again, then saw a thin stream of blood trickle out from under the door at my feet. I pulled my Glock and took hold of the door handle. It wasn’t locked, and I flung it open and raised my weapon.
The only light in the room was the glow of the TV but it was enough to see the shape of a body lying faceup on the floor. I reached around the corner and flicked on the light switch but nothing came on. I took a step in and let my eyes adjust to the dark. The kitchen was beyond the living room and there was a door to the right and a door to the left, both closed. I took a step toward the body and saw that it wasn’t Lopez.
The front of the crisp white shirt of Detective Williams was darkly stained with blood. His tie was flipped up across the middle of his face. A large open wound had cleanly cut his throat.
The small-speed holster on his belt was empty. I checked his hands and the floor around the body but the gun wasn’t there. When I looked up I saw out of the corner of my eye that the door on the left was partly open. I started to turn and raise my weapon but I knew it was too late. I saw a rush of movement, and then felt the blow strike me in the ribs on my left side. The pain shot through my body like a jolt of electricity. My knees buckled and I collapsed onto the floor. I gasped for breath, but the air felt as if it were a fire spreading through my lungs. I tried to raise my gun but it was kicked out of my hand before I could.
“I didn’t do this,” said a voice with a Latino accent.
I tried to look up but even the simple movement of raising my head caused a wave of pain to shoot through my entire body. I looked down expecting to see blood blossoming on the fabric of my shirt but there wasn’t any.
“I didn’t do this,” he said again, louder.
The walls of the room began to spin as I started falling into unconsciousness. I felt a hand groping inside my pocket and removing my ID.
“Delillo,” my attacker said. “Do you understand, I didn’t do this.”
For an instant I saw his face as he tossed my ID onto my chest. He said something else, but I couldn’t hear a single sound, and then the world slipped away from under me.
The sound of the TV brought me back. It was a Spanish station, a clown chasing two women in bikinis around a stage. Had a minute passed? A few seconds? I couldn’t tell. I was on my back, just as I had been when I passed out. I took a breath and a jolt of pain shot through my chest and I nearly vomited. I felt myself beginning to slide back toward unconsciousness but I fought it off, repeating No, no, no, to myself in my head.
I took a shallower breath, just managing to get enough air before the pain sent me reeling. Where am I? Put the pieces back together. I hadn’t been shot or stabbed. Something had hit me.
“Williams,” I whispered.
He was lying several feet from me, the throat wound glistening in the light from the TV. I slowly rose to my knees and saw that I was sitting in a stream of blood. I could feel the moisture soaking through the fabric of my slacks. My heart began to race out of control. I tried to move away from it, to wipe it away from my legs, but with every exertion my head spun faster and faster back toward unconsciousness.
The sound of the door opening and the flood of light from the hallway snapped me back to the moment. The dark shadow of a figure in the doorway reached into the room and seemed to envelop me. I grabbed for my weapon, then remembered that it had been knocked from my hand. I was helpless. I stared at the shadow, waiting for it to close on me, waiting for another blow, but it didn’t come.
As I started to turn toward the door, numbness began to spread the length of my arms and into my hands. I took a shallow breath, then another and another, then slowly turned to the door. A small child, a boy, maybe five years old, was staring at me.
“Police,” I managed to say.
The child stared in wonder at me, and I felt myself beginning to drift again and tumble back toward the darkness.
“Police,” I whispered. “Pol . . .”
7
It was nearly 2 A.M. when LAPD Robbery Homicide detectives released me from the scene. The first uniforms to arrive at the apartment put me in cuffs for several minutes, thinking I was Williams’s killer. Even after the detectives had cleared me, the look of suspicion that I was somehow responsible for Williams’s death accompanied every glance my way. In LAPD minds I was an amateur, a woman who had gotten one of their own killed.
The chief of Pasadena police, Ed Chavez, and Harrison were waiting for me as I stepped out of the paramedics’ truck. EMT had done their best to wash Detective Williams’s blood off me with saline, but it still clung to my pants and stained the skin on my legs. The bandage around my ribs where Hector Lopez had hit me with the baseball bat had softened the searing pain, but each breath was still accompanied by a dull, lingering ache.
Lacy’s big Latino godfather, the tough ex-marine, took one look at me and began to fume.
“Goddamn LAPD,” Chavez said.
I looked into his big brown eyes and shook my head. He had spent much of his career protecting me, even when I didn’t need it. The thought that LAPD would have put me in cuffs for even a second was enough to ignite his fuse.
“I really need a bath,” I said.
He softened, if just a little.
“They wouldn’t even let me take a look at the scene,” Chavez said.
The image of Williams’s dark glistening wound and the severed pearl-white windpipe flashed in my mind.
“I could have done without seeing it,” I said.
They each took an arm and began walking me to my car. There were more than two dozen LAPD units, a SWAT truck, crime-scene investigators, and a mobile command center surrounding the apartment building now. A secure perimeter had been set up in a two-block square. Most of the residents of the building were still out on the street awaiting questioning or because they were afraid to go back inside, thinking a madman was loose in the building.
We crossed the street and stopped at my car. The smell of smoke was stronger now. Tiny flakes of ash were drifting on the wind, covering windshields like a dusting of snow.
“What do I need to know that can’t wait until tomorrow?” Chavez asked.
I took a careful breath, easing the air past my damaged ribs.
“He didn’t do this,” I said.
Chavez looked at me, not understanding.
“I think the wrong man has a target on his back right now,” I said.
“Lopez?”
I nodded. “He told me he didn’t do it.”
&n
bsp; “Right after he whacked you with a baseball bat,” Chavez said. “Innocent people don’t whack cops with baseball bats.”
I glanced at Harrison and saw in his eyes that he understood.
“There was no reason for him to let you live if he killed Williams,” Harrison said. “He had nothing to gain, not the way Williams died.”
Chavez chewed on that for a second, then looked over toward the members of SWAT walking by dressed in tactical black and carrying Mac-10 machine guns.
“LAPD has a different opinion,” he said. “We would be doing the same thing if we lost one of our own.”
“That doesn’t change the fact that Lopez isn’t a killer,” I said.
“So what is he?”
“He’s the only person who can ID the man who took the surveillance tape,” Harrison said.
I started to nod, then realized that might not be entirely accurate.
“There may be someone else. Dana Courson, my . . . Manning’s girlfriend may have seen him.”
“If so, she could be in danger,” Harrison said.
“She said she sensed something was wrong and told him she lived down the hall. He may not know who she is.”
“He found Lopez,” Harrison said.
“And he killed Williams by mistake.”
Chavez looked at me for a moment. “You think the killer thought he was murdering Lopez?”
I nodded. “At least until it was already over, then it was too late.”
“And Lopez walked in and found a dead cop on his floor,” Chavez said.
“I’ll need an address for a Dana Courson in the public defender’s office. She’s a paralegal,” I said.
“I’ll get it,” Chavez said. He took a breath and looked up toward the ash falling out of the darkness. “I could ask what the hell is going on, but I don’t like feeling foolish in front of two of my officers.”
He leveled his big eyes on me. “Is it true Manning was your brother?”
I nodded. “Half brother.”
“And you’re sure it wasn’t suicide?” Chavez asked.
I looked down at the blood staining my pants. “I am now.”
Chavez thought about it for a beat.
“This is all about a fax?” he asked.
